COLUMBUS’ REPORT

Well, are humans naturally egoistic with little regard for others?  Jonah Goldberg provides a description of human nature as portraying the natural people as very apt to steal, exploit, and otherwise advance their own interests, at the expense of others, except for in limited social arrangements.  Those exceptions refer to seeking mutually reciprocal relationships with fellow tribe members – with those that look like themselves.  Is this true?  And why is the question important?

          It’s important because the answer reflects how readily humans are disposed to engage with others.  People who readily engage in exclusively self-advancing behaviors at the expense of others, will not be apt to cooperate enough or collaborate enough to achieve any but the minimal levels of collective accomplishments – that is forgoing the types that characterize not only modern life, but life that has been the state of Western life in the last few hundred years.

          To test Goldberg’s sense of human nature, one can look at the work of anthropologists and archeologists.  When such work comes to mind, this writer thinks of the classic work, Patterns of Culture, by Ruth Benedict.[1]  That anthropologist studied North American tribal societies – the Zuni, Dobu, and Kwkiutl – and their cultures.  Her aim was to show the range of possible human behavior within a specific culture. 

She categorizes that range in terms of a culture’s attitudes and traits and determines how individuals within each culture are defined; that is, what constitutes success, unacceptable or disparaged behaviors, or intolerable behaviors.  In other words, these are not predetermined or universal traits, but developed within the experiences of each culture.

With that, the findings of a famous historical character – famous not for his anthropological work, but for his exploratory adventures – are used here.  Christopher Columbus, as any school age child can recite, “sailed the ocean blue, in 1492.”  In terms of Europe and sailing under the Spanish flag, he “discovered” America (more accurately, Caribbean islands) at the end of the fifteenth century.  He also encountered those islands’ indigenous peoples.  In terms of this posting’s aim, in a letter to one of his supporters,[2] Columbus described how these islanders behaved.

Given that in 1492 there was no chance that modern life would have had any influence on these people, as perhaps Ruth’s observed people might have had in the 1930s, his observations, it is judged here, has more power in determining how much the observed tribespeople reflected Goldberg’s view of human nature.  So, how did Columbus describe these people?

According to this cited letter, the first people Columbus encountered were on the island he named Espanola.  On that island, he and his men found and described a people with the following characteristics:

·        They lived in sets of dwellings indicating they were not nomadic.

·        They were almost totally naked except for women who covered their “private” parts with leafy material.

·        They had no weapons.

·        They initially and for a good amount of time would run away when they encountered or saw the explorers.

·        In general, they were highly fearful and had a timid demeanor.

·        In their “running away,” they readily left behind their children and their children readily left behind their parents.  They just scattered.

·        Their practice of fleeing was maintained even when the explorers offered them gifts.

·        Eventually, they were convinced that their new guests did not pose them any danger and eventually they interacted with the explorers.

·        They were very simple in their customs and demonstrated honesty in their interactions.

·        They did not exhibit any possessiveness over what they possessed.  That is, they readily gave their things away among themselves and with the explorers.

·        They exhibited high levels of love toward all others including the explorers.

·        They seemed content with little amounts of material things.

·        They expressed the beliefs, once they began interacting with the explorers, that these new arrivals – the Europeans – were from heaven.

·        Most of these tribespeople led monogamous relationships with their “married” partners except for the “king” and “princes” who had polygamous arrangements of 20 wives.

·        There was no sign of private property; the needed or wanted things were meted out by a king’s agent who simply distributed those things.

In the opinion of this writer, this doesn’t seem to support Goldberg’s view of human nature.  In fact, Columbus’ encounters, which also included other groups of the islands, seem to be the complete opposite.  But before one believes this was pure paradise, there was an exception.

          To the east of Espanola there was another island called – presumably named by Columbus – Charis.  There lived a group that did not follow the customs of the others and this divergence gives one a reason to why the other groups vigorously ran away upon seeing the newcomers among their midst.  Here is how Columbus describes this other group:

·        They were ferocious and considered as such by the peoples of the other islands.

·        They fed on human flesh.

·        By using sophisticated canoes (which the other peoples also had), they visited and attacked the other islands, robbing and plundering these more peaceful groups.

·        They shared the same physical appearance as their peaceful counterparts except for the fact the men wore their hair just as long as the female islanders.  This similarity indicated they shared the same genetic ancestors as the other groups.

·        They had weapons, usually bows and javelins with sharpened tips.  They were made of cane.

·        They readily instilled fear in their neighboring islanders.

·        Along with their weapons, they also had brass plates – their island had ample supply of brass – for defensive purposes.

These inhabitants of Charis are more in line with Goldberg’s description of how human nature manifests itself in pre-“civilized” peoples.  But in terms of the Caribbean (or those islands Columbus reported on), these people are the exception, not the rule.

          This writer finds several facts as particularly troubling in accepting Goldberg’s view.  These tribespeople for the most part are fearful of foreigners, but not apt to be antagonistic towards them.  They are not egoistic but concerned for their fellow inhabitants.  Why this arrangement among these different tribes evolved into being what they were is anyone’s guess, but it seems hard to just dismiss this evidence in judging the veracity of Goldberg’s view.

          Now, one can say Columbus was not a trained anthropologist and he might have had hidden motivations to communicate the observations he reported.  After all, he believed for the rest of his life that he had reached the eastern most extension of the Asian continent or, at least, islands off that coast.  Of course, it became evident that that was not the case but not until after Columbus died.  The only motivation he betrays in his written account was his wish to encourage conversions of the islanders to what he believed to be the true religion, Catholicism.

If that is the extent of his aims, his report provides counter information vis-vis Goldberg’s argument.  Yet, even in an environment where basic needs are readily met, those types of places did not have sufficient challenges to encourage the development of civilization – a la Arnold Toynbee’s theory for the beginnings of civilizations.[3]  One should not consider these islanders as being naturally deficient in their natural abilities.  As a matter of fact, Columbus communicates respect for not only their social dispositions, but their cognitive abilities as well.

Where survival is basically secured by the natural environment, as in these islands in the Caribbean, those locations’ populations will not have the motivations or reasons to develop the technologies to meet demanding natural challenges – such as cycles of flooding in Mesopotamia.  Further, they will not have the reason to develop the modes of production and the resulting cooperation and collaboration such large projects, like controlling such flooding, demand.  In turn, where it does happen, such developments lead to forming the other elements of a civilization.

In terms of this blog’s review of Goldberg’s argument, Columbus provides serious counter information.  Yes, there were the Charisians, but they were the exception and that fact leads one to believe that the cultural character of a group develops from past events and other factors. 

What one can say is that natural humans are open to a variety of cultural traits and they can range from peaceful, cooperative, loving behaviors to vicious, destructive, violent, thieving behavior patterns, and the like.  What good public policy should be – what governments should be set up to do – is protect populations against one extreme while encouraging the other. 

That is, protect against the robbers and to promote the charitable.  That is what federation theory aims to do and this blog is set up, in its modest way, to assist.  Next posting will further this critique of Goldberg’s foundational construct.

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[1] Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston, MA:  Houghton Mifflin, 1934).

[2] Christopher Columbus, “1493, Christopher Columbus:  Discovery of the New World,” The Annals of America, eds. Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren (Chicago, IL:  Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1968), 1-5.

[3] Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History (New York, NY:  Dell Publishing Co. Inc., 1971).  While Toynbee’s theory has been extensively critiqued, his overall relationship between challenges and responses has, in the opinion of this writer, held up.